Every New Yorker has a favorite summertime treat. As a girl, mine was cotton candy, that wondrous melt-in-your-mouth confection that vanishes when it touches your tongue. For me, it still brings to mind bumper cars and roller coaster rides, street festivals and jelly-sandaled strolls.

But it had been more than 25 years since I had sampled some. So last week, I hopped on the F train to Coney Island, where the fragrance of funnel cakes and cotton candy is summer’s seaside perfume. I was there to spend some time with a cotton-candy-making maestro: Jenny Villon, a 30-year-old mother of three who has been weaving the sweet stuff in this Brooklyn neighborhood for nearly a decade.

She works behind the counter at Williams Candy, an old-fashioned candy store that is next to Nathan’s Famous, the hot-dog joint. When business is hopping, she makes 100 bags of cotton candy a day that sell for $4 a pop. To spend time with her, during the busiest season of the year, is to get a taste of what has changed, and what has not, in Coney Island and in New York City.

“They teach me right away, the second day I’m here,” said Ms. Villon, who emigrated from Mexico as a teenager. She never dreamed that she would spend most of her working life making cotton candy. But life is like that, full of unexpected detours. And straightaways.

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Jenny Villon, 30, who emigrated from Mexico as a teenager, makes cotton candy at Williams Candy.CreditHiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Ms. Villon guided me past the ice cream maker and the popcorn popper to the Whirlwind and the Tornado, two of the cotton candy machines made by Gold Medal Products Company.

To get started, you need some sugar. Cotton candy is almost 100 percent sugar, with dashes of flavoring and food coloring. The store uses about 200 pounds of it every week for cotton candy during the bustling summer months.

Ms. Villon poured two scoops into a tube in the center of the Whirlwind’s maw. Then she flipped a switch and the tube began to spin, heat and hum. Soon, sugary cobwebs appeared and then the familiar pink fluff.

She reached in barehanded (gloves impede the process, she said), grabbed the cotton, and with a few flips of the wrist created a neat, fluffy ball, which she tucked into a plastic bag. It took 30 seconds flat.

The process requires a good eye and a quick hand. A novice (like me) can end up with cotton candy flying onto the floor or with a small, limp bundle that is tasty but unappealing to the eye. (Mine ended up in my backpack, not on the shelf.)

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Indera Phillips, 7, of the Bronx in Coney Island.CreditHiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Hot, humid days can make the candy sticky and hard to bag. And when the machines get going, sometimes they spit out hot bits of rock sugar that burn your hands. Ms. Villon is matter-of-fact about that. “Sometimes, they get me,” she said.

At Williams Candy, which is owned by Peter Agrapides Jr., cotton candy has been made in much the same way for 32 years, using the same flavors, pink vanilla and blue raspberry, and the same colors, pink and blue, that I loved as a child.

But there’s no escaping change in this city. In the 1990s, the Agrapides family stopped attaching cotton candy to a stick. (Just putting it in a bag required less work, Mr. Agrapides said.) Since then, the staff has changed, too.

In the 1980s and 1990s, most employees were African-American or Puerto Rican and many were teenagers working summer jobs, he said. Nowadays, they are mostly immigrants and many more are adults, like Ms. Villon, who have struggled to find better-paying jobs in this uncertain economy.

Ms. Villon, who earns $11 an hour and works year round, grew up savoring lollipops and chewing gum in Mexico. At home, she makes chocolate-covered strawberries, never the fluffy pink stuff. “I get tired of candy,” she confessed.

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At Williams Candy shop in Coney Island, cotton candy has been made in much the same way for 32 years.CreditHiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Over the years, she has grown accustomed to the sugary scent that lingers in her hair, long workdays during the summer and shorter ones in winter when the staff focuses on catering parties, bridal showers and bar mitzvahs.

Ms. Villon said she sometimes dreams about finding another job, one with more regular hours and better wages, the kind she once imagined for herself when she arrived in the United States at age 15.

“Being a nurse, yeah,” Ms. Villon said, thinking of those faded hopes. Then she shrugged, not one to dwell on her troubles.

She knows that she is part and parcel of summertime rituals, as integral as the feeling of sand between your toes and those leisurely jaunts down the boardwalk.

So when a crowd of customers walked in during my visit, Ms. Villon greeted them with a smile and watched as they dived into her delectable creations.

It was just as I remembered: that taste, the glorious sweetness that holds for just an instant. Then it’s gone, a reminder that summer, like life in this city, is often bittersweet.

Email: swarns@nytimes.com

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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Weaving a Confection That Tastes Like Long-Ago Summers. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe